Ride this elevator to Hell... and Back!
source: http://www.boardsmag.com/articles/online/20090604/civilization.html
-
-
- slagface
- added this
Guests of the newly-opened Standard Hotel in New York will get a view of heaven when they ascend the elevator to their rooms and a glimpse of hell on the way back down to street level thanks to Marco Brambilla.
After seeing the director and video artist's work in a gallery last year, boutique hotelier Andre Balazs asked him to create a permanent installation to be displayed on high-definition monitors in the Standard's elevators.
Brambilla responded by creating Civilization, a video mural based on Dante's Divine Comedy that scrolls in synch with the movement of the 18-storey hotel's elevators. "The idea of doing a ‘video mural' had interested me for quite some time and the journey from hell to heaven depicted in this way seemed to be a good fit," he said in a statement about the work.
Produced by Toronto-based Crush, Civilization is comprised of 400 individual channels of looped clips: obscure film and stock footage, Hollywood movie moments and original CG imagery. Brambilla (who is repped for commercials by The Ebeling Group) spent three months researching and cataloguing footage before spending six weeks - working mostly at night - pasting together painterly collages in Flame and ordering them into a narrative journey: hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven, upper heaven and back to lower hell.
After seeing the director and video artist's work in a gallery last year, boutique hotelier Andre Balazs asked him to create a permanent installation to be displayed on high-definition monitors in the Standard's elevators.
Brambilla responded by creating Civilization, a video mural based on Dante's Divine Comedy that scrolls in synch with the movement of the 18-storey hotel's elevators. "The idea of doing a ‘video mural' had interested me for quite some time and the journey from hell to heaven depicted in this way seemed to be a good fit," he said in a statement about the work.
Produced by Toronto-based Crush, Civilization is comprised of 400 individual channels of looped clips: obscure film and stock footage, Hollywood movie moments and original CG imagery. Brambilla (who is repped for commercials by The Ebeling Group) spent three months researching and cataloguing footage before spending six weeks - working mostly at night - pasting together painterly collages in Flame and ordering them into a narrative journey: hell, lower purgatory, middle purgatory, upper purgatory, heaven, upper heaven and back to lower hell.
-
- groups:
- Community, Entertainment, Music, Culture, 11 more
-
- tags:
- News, Entertainment, Culture, Music, 31 more
-
-
micromermaid
-
The Pillsbury Doughboy is the best part.
- 2 years ago
-
micromermaid
-
-
SupaDawg
-
Stay Puft at 1:15. love it.
- 2 years ago
-
SupaDawg
-
-
Elligirl
-
Incredible project. Long live art!
- 2 years ago
-
Elligirl
-
-
NumLock [removed]
- This comment was removed as a violation of community guidelines.
-
NumLock [removed]
-
-
theultimateend
-
NumLock:
Most descriptions of heaven are troubling at best and hellish at worst.
So yes I have to agree with your point :).
- 2 years ago
-
theultimateend
-
-
librelover
-
Yea, I'd end up losing a day in an elevator trying to observe all the little obscure details. Very intricate.
- 2 years ago
-
librelover
-
-
meli8
-
This is awesome. I would probably forget to get off of the elevator for staring at this for too long!
- 2 years ago
-
meli8
